I’m a zero too.  In fact, according to the “HowManyofMe” search engine, no one in the United States has my last name.

Not me, not my sister, not my brother and his wife and his sons.  And not the 40 or so other people with the same surname, according to the Intelius teaser that would like to get me to spend money to search their records.  (None of whom could possibly be my relatives, as my father made up the name in the late 1940s, changing it from his very-Russian name.)

Well, from one nobody to another, think what we could get away with if we don’t exist?

My brother, on the other hand, appears to share his name with over a thousand other people. According to this database, anyway. In reality, I’d guess even more than that.

I know that other people have your last name because I’ve run into it a time or two. Not related, of course, but very clearly the same last name.

The thing has a slightly skewed database, at least from what I’ve read on other blogs whose owners have tried it.  It says something in its FAQ about the derivation of the stats it uses.  There are 14 of me, theoretically.  There used to be three non-related people with the same last name just in the Honolulu phone book alone, and then there’s Cameron Diaz’s squeeze, too.

Boy I wish I had your results, Kate.  There are 998 of me, according to the site.  You have no idea how many errant emails I’ve been receiving lately for people who aren’t me… And they’re not even spam!

Odd, the captcha isn’t working.  The word is neith, but it keeps saying I’m not submitting it as typed.  Anybody else seen this, or is it me?

There are 11.  And I’m surprised that there are that many.  I have an unusual last name, which I happen to like, and there aren’t many more than 1,000 people in this country with that last name.

With my name it would have been surprising to find a match. There isn’t even one in my own country, as far as I know.

Dave, sometimes the random placement of the captcha word in the little box makes the last couple of letters drop off the end. Usually it happens for longer words, though. Your word was probably “neither”. That’s not a very big word. Someone needs to write in an if --> then query into the program to account for longer words.

It’s funny, for a couple of years I was on a family’s email list based just on my initials that I used in the email address. I learned all about that family and even after contacting them to tell them they were spilling all kinds of secrets to a complete stranger, they still kept me on their email list! After a while, they felt like family.

Linkmeister, your name made me smile the first time I saw it. Nothing like sharing with a celeb! But, really, did it have to be that one?

Well, Cassie, even with only 11 people sharing your name, the likelihood of running into another one of them is pretty slim with 300 million of us roaming the continent. There’s a little comfort in that. It’s kind of fun having an uncommon name.

Volkher, you’re also an original!

It was the late-night telephone calls from the 11-year-old girls that drove us crazy, back when his band was THE BOMB.

Linkmeister’s note got me to thinking about famous people and fictional characters. 

A quite famous author, now deceased, shared both my surname and my father’s first initial.  One of his works was made into a multi-Oscar-winning movie starring Humphrey Bogart. 

Louis L’Amour wrote a novel about a family with my surname, which was made into a movie .. in which such actors as Tom Selleck, Sam Elliott, and Ben Johnson played members of that family.  In another movie, the character played by top-billed Keanu Reeves had my surname. 

Searching IMDb for characters with my surname, I was amazed to find 27(!) of them in movies and TV shows, 19 males and 8 females.  Quite a few familiar actors, too.  In addition to the ones I already mentioned, there’s Nehemiah Persoff, Theodore Bikel, and Jack Lemmon.

Maybe there have been so many works of art featuring characters with my last name because it’s really true that no one by that name exists in the United States…

Fiction makes all things possible. They didn’t want to step on any real life toes, y’know?

Linkmeister, that would have sent me screaming into the mountains. Just what everyone needs to experience just once—little 11 year old ga-ga girls calling in search of their heart throb.